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William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet on Screen
Rösslerová, Eva ; Nováková, Soňa (advisor) ; Horová, Miroslava (referee)
THESIS ABSTRACT The aim of the thesis is to explore the film adaptations of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and to compare their thematic shifts of the adapted text. Primary focus will be put on Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet (1968), Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet (1996), and Carlo Carlei's Romeo & Juliet (2013). This choice does not entirely exclude other adaptations, as they will be alluded to whenever some of their features become relevant to the discussion at hand. The thesis is based on my reading of this tragedy and supplemented by secondary sources. It analyses three themes of the play, and subsequent adaptation issues, in order to introduce and compare the individual directors' readings of these particular instances and their overall narrative strategies applied in the films. The impact of the various renditions of the themes will be compared and examined in terms of its influence on the audience's perception of the plot. Currently, many people experience Shakespeare's plays trough film and it is productive to examine what perceptions of the plays they form when encountering the playwright in this re-created manner. Some of the questions that this analysis will address are: What visual means do the directors employ to establish new dimension to the adapted text? What is transmitted...
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New Mythology: The Redefinition of British Hellenism in Selected Poetry of Percy B. Shelley and John Keats
Neumannová, Edita ; Horová, Miroslava (advisor) ; Beran, Zdeněk (referee)
This bachelor thesis sets to examine Romantic Hellenism in selected works of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley. During the Romantic era, Ancient Greece occupied a unique position, on the one hand it was admired and promoted as an ideal, on the other hand it was reduced to a very limited selection of texts even at university level. While the Romantic movement originally strived to liberate itself from the classical authorities and sought their own, new ways of poetic expression, the second generation of English Romantic poets made interesting attempts to appropriate the legacy of Ancient Greece, only this time (allegedly) independent of the established canonical views. In my thesis I examine the question of (both actual and perceived) authenticity, the influence of other interpretations, and the problem of authority in the selected works of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, two second-generation Romantic poets whose education pertaining to the classical world was substantially different. My goal is not to judge the appropriateness of the varying allusions to Ancient Greece in their work, but rather to examine the different relations of the authors to the different, insurmountably other and idolised world. The first chapter is concerned with the authors' different approaches to the original...
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The Ideal of Beauty in the Period of Romanticism
Páchová, Kateřina ; Procházka, Martin (advisor) ; Horová, Miroslava (referee)
(in English): The aim of the thesis is to study the ideal of beauty in the period of Romanticism. The study is based on a close analysis of one of the crucial texts of the Romantic period - the Lyrical Ballads written by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The thesis is concerned with the vision of the beautiful in relation to the aesthetics of the sublime. It focuses on the development of what was perceived as beautiful in the periods preceding Romanticism and how this vision changed for the Romantics. The question is what is the ideal of beauty in the period of Romanticism and how it is presented in the Lyrical Ballads? Is there a common ideal for Wordsworth and Coleridge, or do they differ in their notion of the beautiful? The main focus of the thesis is the discrepancy between the beautiful, on one hand, and the sublime or the grotesque, on the other, both in perceiving the nature and human beings. The Romantics have several similar features as well as the vision of the beautiful, whether they praise women or men or nature, whether they deal with the beauty inside or the surface. Similarities between those are considered as well. The reflexion of aesthetics of the beautiful and the sublime is drawn primarily from Edmund Burke's The Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas...
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History and Play in Lord Byron's Dramas
Horová, Miroslava ; Procházka, Martin (advisor) ; Beran, Zdeněk (referee) ; Minta, Stephen (referee)
History is a major point of inquiry and exploration in all Byron's major, and many of his minor, works. Byron understands and conceptualizes history and its tight and troubled relationship with literature, drawing attention to the literariness of history and the historicity of literature in his wake. The aspiration to the 'truth' of history is, for Byron, a highly creative process, highlighting the cross-pollination of fact and fiction, and also exploring history's inherent theatricality. Historical writing shapes but, crucially, also distorts our understanding of history. The dramatic works of Lord Byron are, on the whole, traditionally the least critically explored territory of his oeuvre. Byron's singular understanding and conceptualization of history in his dramas is the focus of this study, comprising the seven dramatic works he wrote between 1820 and 1822. As this thesis shows, these dramas make up a dynamic dramatic project, creating a space of formal, discursive and thematic experimentation, which reveals not only Byron's intense involvement in matters of drama but also, in a wider perspective, his understanding and treatment of history. This study takes up Byron's treatment of history in his dramas and analyses it through the methodology of play laid out and adapted for use in literary...
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The Romantic Prometheus: Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein", P. B. Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound" and Lord Byron's "Manfred".
Hupcejová, Anna ; Horová, Miroslava (advisor) ; Beran, Zdeněk (referee)
Following the time of political turmoil and social change sweeping through Europe (the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the Industrial Revolution), the mythological figure of Prometheus was especially popular in English Romantic literature. The Promethean symbol and values of liberty and defiance were evident inspirations of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Percy Bysshe Shelley's Prometheus Unbound and George Gordon Byron's Manfred. Being generally interested in English Romantic literature, I seek to discuss in what ways and to what extent have the Romantics rewritten the themes associated with the Titan for the purposes of modernity. Prometheus' chief characteristics are his caring and self-sacrificing, yet rebellious and cunning nature - he is in short an individual that the Romantics could relate to, also because he suffered for his beliefs and was mentally strong enough to stand up against the Olympian authorities. His name translates as 'forethought' or 'foresight' and this is without doubt connected to why the Romantics found him relevant to their time. There are a few issues that will need to be confronted. First of all, there are countless versions of the ancient myth, so instead I will direct my attention to the values and symbols associated with Prometheus. Secondly, there are also other...
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Lord Byron's tragicomic muse: exploring the theme of stigmatization in Manfred, Cain and Heaven and Earth
Horová, Miroslava ; Beran, Zdeněk (referee) ; Procházka, Martin (advisor)
The general public image of Lord Byron (in)famously amounts to a set of gilded platitudes - the Romantic sex-symbol, the lover of women, men, wine and freedom, the revolutionary suffering the premature death of a true hero - all adding up to constitute the notorious notion of a celebrity, anchored in the melodrama of an exotic life with a tragic end. In short, ever since the phenomenal success of the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage in 1812, the poet has been distilled into a rather appetizing cocktail of hyperbole, originating in the theretofore unprecedented cult of personality epitomized by sheer stylishness and daunting eroticism. Thus in the long run, as far as the laity is concerned, we inevitably see Lord Byron join the catalogue of ill-famed idols featuring the disparate likes of John Wilmot or James Dean. Moreover, the scandalous momentum of the poet's life has continuously been pushing the oeuvre into a shameful shade, the consequence of which being that Byron's work is largely perceived as merely echoing, in fateful chimes, the biographical bane of incest, debauchery, intolerable cruelty in matrimony etcetera - the allegedly numerous moral trespasses eventually resulting in a dramatic fall from grace and exile. Stereotypes conjured out ofthe bog of Byron's life stifle the voices of...
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